Hisham Hagar is the executive country manager for Vertex Pharmaceuticals across the Gulf Cooperation Council, leading efforts to expand access to genetic therapies and strengthen healthcare partnerships in the region. With over two decades of experience in the Middle East, he oversees the company’s Riyadh Gulf regional headquarters and discusses the rollout of the first CRISPR-based therapy, as well as the four-pillar framework he sees as essential for long-term regional engagement.
Could you begin by introducing yourself – your background, your current role, and Vertex’s positioning across the region?
I currently lead Vertex’s operations across the GCC as Executive Country Manager. My focus is on enabling and expanding access to transformative therapies for patients, and on building sustainable healthcare partnerships across the region. I have spent more than two decades in the pharmaceutical industry across the Middle East, and that experience has given me a deep understanding of the region’s healthcare landscape and its rapidly evolving priorities.
At Vertex, we are committed to being a long-term partner in the region’s healthcare transformation journey. That commitment extends well beyond bringing innovative therapies to patients -also including advancing progress with innovative therapies and how they get to eligible patients. By aligning with the ambitious national transformation agendas visible across the GCC – including Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and its National Biotechnology Strategy – we aim to contribute to the region’s emergence as a leader in biotechnology and advanced therapies.
Vertex is a global biotechnology company, yet it has made a notably deliberate and substantive commitment to the GCC specifically. What is the strategic rationale for that focus?
The GCC carries a significantly higher burden of life limiting genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia in particular – than many other parts of the world. That is not simply a statistical observation; it represents a profound and urgent need for therapies that address the underlying causes of these conditions rather than managing their symptoms. Sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia are serious, life-shortening, progressive genetic disorders caused by mutations in the haemoglobin beta gene. They affect every dimension of a patient’s life – physical, emotional, social, and functional – while simultaneously placing an enormous burden on healthcare systems through recurrent hospitalisation, ongoing complications, and long-term treatment costs that accumulate across a patient’s lifetime.
The opportunity today is to move decisively beyond symptom management and toward treatment approaches that address the root cause of these diseases. That is precisely where Vertex’s science is focused, and it is why there is such a strong alignment between what we do as a company and the needs of clinicians and patients in this region
Beyond the immediate therapeutic need, the GCC is undergoing a genuine transformation in its healthcare and biotechnology ambitions. National agendas – Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and its National Biotechnology Strategy being the most prominent – are not simply policy documents. They represent a serious, well-funded, and structurally supported commitment to building world-class healthcare capabilities. Vertex’s long-term vision aligns naturally with that direction, and we see an important role for ourselves as a partner in that transformation – not only as a provider of innovative therapies, but as a contributor to the broader ecosystem being built around them.
Vertex’s CRISPR-based gene therapy, a landmark in the history of medicine, received FDA approval in late 2023. What progress has been made in bringing it to patients in the GCC, and what has that process required in practice?
The progress has been remarkable, and I want to be specific about why – because it has been driven in very meaningful ways by the governments of the region themselves,
On the diagnostic side, the Saudi Ministry of Health has taken important steps in early patient identification. The national new-born screening programme was expanded in 2023 to include hemoglobinopathies such as sickle cell disease. We regard that as a critical foundation: timely diagnosis is the prerequisite for timely access to care, and without it, potentially transformative medicines cannot reach the patients who need it.
In October 2025, Vertex signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi Ministry of Health to support the expansion of the national patient registry managed by the Ministry in conjunction with the relevant clinical associations. That agreement is designed to gather vital patient data, track health outcomes, and support long-term sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia research. It also includes a commitment to national awareness campaigns to promote early diagnosis and broader public understanding of these conditions.
On access, Saudi Arabia demonstrated genuine leadership by being the first country globally to approve the first CRISPR-based therapy through the Saudi Food and Drug Authority’s accelerated access pathway, facilitating and expediting patient access to this therapy. That regulatory speed reflects a seriousness of intent that we find enormously encouraging as a partner.
The administration of advanced therapies of this kind requires highly specialised infrastructure and multidisciplinary clinical expertise. For that reason, we are working closely with leading healthcare institutions such as the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNGHA) and across the region to support the establishment of a network of independently operated, authorised treatment centres – facilities that are capable of delivering these therapies safely and effectively. Our long-term goal is to ensure sustainable access and availability for eligible patients while contributing to the broader advancement of healthcare capabilities across the GCC.
These therapies carry significant costs. How are you approaching the question of sustainable funding and reimbursement in a way that ensures access is real rather than theoretical?
This is where the depth of Vertex’s commitment to the region becomes most visible. In December 2024, we signed a landmark memorandum of understanding involving not one but three Saudi ministries simultaneously – the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Investment, and the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources. The breadth of that agreement reflects how we think about partnership, where we have built a framework as for long-term collaboration based on four interconnected pillars: research and development, local manufacturing to serve regional patients, talent development, and expanding access to transformative therapies.
I want to be clear about what that means in practice. On local manufacturing, we have an active ambition to support Saudi Arabia in becoming not just a local production hub but a regional one for this class of innovative medicines. That aligns directly with the National Biotechnology Strategy and with the broader localisation priorities the Kingdom has established. On research and development, we are committed to bringing clinical trials into the region – and the infrastructure and scientific leadership to support them genuinely exist here. On talent development, we are working with partners to develop Saudi scientific expertise, including a custom-made seminar series designed specifically for Saudi scientists – not a generic programme adapted from elsewhere, but one built from the ground up for this context. And on access, we are working toward national funding frameworks for advanced therapies that provide a sustainable basis for patient access now and for future treatments beyond sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia.
What I want to emphasise is that these four pillars are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Building local manufacturing capability requires local talent. Generating local clinical evidence supports regulatory and reimbursement decisions that benefits patients. Supporting the scientific community strengthens the ecosystem within which future innovation can take place. The whole is considerably greater than the sum of its parts, and that is what a genuine long-term partnership looks like in practice.
Vertex has historically been closely associated with a single franchise – cystic fibrosis. The company is now advancing programmes in pain, kidney disease, and type one diabetes. How do you see those emerging therapeutic areas taking shape in the GCC context?
Vertex’s identity as a company has always been defined by a commitment to serious diseases with high unmet medical need and by a deep understanding of causal biology – the underlying genetic and molecular drivers of disease. That approach has produced transformative results in cystic fibrosis, and the same strategic logic is now being applied to a broader set of conditions. What connects these programmes is not the therapeutic area but the scientific philosophy: identify the causal mechanism, and develop a therapy that modifies the disease rather than merely managing its consequences.
Kidney diseases are a relevant example as we learn more about their causal biology. Given kidney diseases carry a significant burden and to date have had limited new therapeutic approaches. Vertex has multiple programmes in clinical-stage development in that space and is working to close critical gaps in care, aiming first to help Saudi patients with Immunoglobulin A (IgA) – Nephropathy in the next few years More broadly, the GCC is increasingly positioning itself as an active contributor to global biotechnology innovation – through investments in clinical development infrastructure, research capabilities, and healthcare transformation. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to hosting clinical trials across a range of disease areas and its long-term investment in biotechnology capabilities are direct expressions of that ambition. As Vertex expands its pipeline, the region’s evolving infrastructure and scientific depth make it a progressively more important partner in that development work.
What is Vertex’s assessment of the GCC as a market and partner, relative to more established pharmaceutical markets in Europe and elsewhere? What can global headquarters learn from what is happening here?
The single most distinctive characteristic of the GCC countries is the scale of their long-term ambitions. Many pharmaceutical markets are mature and can be structurally constrained.
What we see across the GCC are countries with clear national visions, substantial government investment behind them, and appetite to lead rather than follow in the development of advanced therapies and biotechnology capabilities and a commitment to treat patients in need. The alignment between Vertex’s own long-term vision – serial innovation, transformative medicines, deep engagement with the science of genetic disease – and the direction these national agendas are taking is as strong as anywhere in the world.
We have made a conscious decision to establish our regional headquarters in Riyadh precisely because physical proximity to the relevant stakeholders is essential to the kind of collaboration we are pursuing. Regulatory approvals, reimbursement discussions, clinical development partnerships, talent programmes – all of these benefit from being conducted in close, sustained engagement rather than from a distance. The transformation underway here is real, and it is moving fast.
